Theft in a Village gives Bad Omen

Many have brought up concerns over how easy villages are in survival mode. In fact, Mojang’s original reasoning for such bare village was to counter the possibility of a player finding a village and getting all the resources they’d ever need, striping the game of its “survival” nature.

But still, there were crop farms and blacksmith shops which were notorious among the community as excellent places to steal from the poor villagers.

It becomes especially ironic when you are trading for emeralds from the villagers with the wheat you just stole from them.

1.14 up this even further. Now villages have beds, carpet, and workstations.

My fix for this issue is a simple one. Any time a player destroys a crop, bed, or workstation within a village, they are given the bad omen effect, which triggers a raid that makes a player second-guess their attempted robbery.

Give them a more logical drawback. It makes no sense for the Illagers to suddenly decide to attack a Village because some random Player stole from it, specially when the Player currently has to provoke them by taking out one of their patrols. The most obvious would be to make it so stealing lowers the Player's reputation.
As for selling Villagers their own wheat, it actually makes sense: They're paying you for harvesting their crops, not for the crops themselves; so you're working for them.
In the cas eof beds, you could make it so Players cannot sleep in Villager-owned beds, and only results in the Player getting kicked out by an annoyed Villager (Probably, one could take very low damage, just for the death message).

Why not have the villagers 'Up' their prices or lower the quantity of items you get if you try selling them stuff you stole from their village
or if there's an iron golem around - he'll start to attack you

Gonna be honest, I'm not really a fan of this one. It doesn't make logical sense, and it means accidentally breaking something can cause a Raid. Worse yet, in player-built villages, all of a sudden the player may find that he is unable to farm from his nearby wheat farm without starting a raid. Lastly, it seems like this would be upsetting for small children who want to "help" the villagers by building them a nicer house or something.

Personally, I'm more of a fan of AMPPL50's suggestion of increasing prices and, if the villagers get mad enough, making iron golems aggressive. To counter this, placing a workstation or bed in the vicinity of the village will calm the villagers equivalently. That way if you break something but put it back, it's no harm no foul. In addition, breaking crops, for the moment, shouldn't make villagers mad at you if only because crops are so easy to break. Villages are also one of the only ways to get potatoes and carrots, and I imagine most people get their potatoes and carrots that way unless they're extremely lucky with a zombie.

As for the issue of villages breaking survival by adding quite a hefty amount of resources to start out with, I think the solution here is to simply change how Villages spawn. I've been in plenty of worlds where I spawn right next to a village, and I think it's time to change that. Instead of the current system:

- Abandoned Villages are a thing. An Abandoned Village would contain little-to-no loot, no workstations, no beds and some of the structures would show signs of damage or decay. Farmland would be replaced with dirt or path blocks and there would be no crops to be found.

- Zombie Villages, as opposed to right now, would be packed full of zombie villagers, all of them wearing leather, iron and rarely gold helmets and a few regular Zombies carrying weapons. A few zombie spawners would be located in some of the larger buildings where workstations would normally be located. These would only spawn regular zombies, however, meaning that you can't turn a zombie village into a farm for regular villagers. (I could add some restrictions to the spawner, but this is a suggestion about Villages, not spawners.)

- Possibly Zombie Villages could have different loot from regular villages, possibly not.

- No Villages spawn within a 500-block radius of spawn.

- Zombie Villages or new Abandoned Villages spawn infrequently in a 1000-block radius.

Given that this would mean any given village could be abandoned or filled with Zombies, that means that a player needs to think twice before entering a village and may not even find anything worth stealing. If they do get lucky enough after quite a bit of exploration, they can try and steal a few workstations or a bed, but theft will not benefit them in the long run.

As a final note, I don't feel like stealing workstations is that much of a problem. Many of the workstations require very little besides iron, string, wood or other easy-to-get early-to-mid-game materials. I could see how stealing a bed might break the balance since beds are now required to stop swarms of phantoms from attacking you, but even then it's not a huge game-breaking issue. That being said, it would make logical sense if committing crime had its consequences.

No Support, but I do agree that the issue this suggestion is trying to fix might at least be worth it fixing, just in different ways.

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My avatar is a texture from a small block game I made in Python. It's not very good and it probably won't work if you install it.

I'm very alone in my Minecraft worlds as I don't have a very good internet connection to run a server. If you're like me, you might be interested in my Posse mod suggestion.

I can't agree with this idea at all. One of my favorite things to do with Villages are remodel and expand them and that occasionally means I need to break their crops, beds, or workstations to move them. Am I supposed to deal with a raid every time I try and modify the Village that I built up from 4 simple huts into a sprawling metropolis?

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I can't agree with this idea at all. One of my favorite things to do with Villages are remodel and expand them and that occasionally means I need to break their crops, beds, or workstations to move them. Am I supposed to deal with a raid every time I try and modify the Village that I built up from 4 simple huts into a sprawling metropolis?

Would you like it if some powerful stranger showed up in your town and decided to "remodel it" by tearing down your homes, destroying your crops, and rebuilding everything?

Would you like it if some powerful stranger showed up in your town and decided to "remodel it" by tearing down your homes, destroying your crops, and rebuilding everything?

Not to inject politics into somewhere it's not wanted, but my city in RL literally just got through fighting off this exact scenario. A group of powerful businessmen wanted to merge two counties together, and attempted to hold a state-wide election on the issue that would have allowed the entire rest of the state to dictate whether these two counties would have to merge or not. We beat them back, but the group made a promise to come back in force and are clearly attempting to rebrand themselves.

IF villages had some property that instilled sense-of-ownership AND you were doing work on a village you didn't own, you should be punished in some way. I disagree about triggering a random attack from a third party unassociated with the village (and which is, in fact, a natural enemy to them), but there's largely no other options. Maybe instead of pillagers villagers could create a flurry of golem gossip that temporarily overrides golem spawning limits by a large factor (ie, if the limit for this particular village is 2 golems then maybe this "code red" event generates 20)?

If they improved everything I honestly would like it. Just imagine someone coming to your home, destroying it, and turning it into a much better home for you. Would you not want that?

You know those home-remodeling shows on cable tv networks (the DIY channel, the HGTV channel, etc)? Some of them hold little contests in many different cities and pick a winner to surprise them with a dream-house makeover. These are sometimes done in a surprise manner, via friends and family of the homeowner while they're out of town or otherwise occupied by important events elsewhere (ie, recuperating in a nursing home.) Most of the time, the homeowner thinks they've won the lottery or something and they regard this upgrade as a gift from god. Well, as luck would have it, one of these shows held such a contest in my hometown (the winner turned out to be someone in my neighborhood about 4 streets away) but when the reveal was made to the homeowner they went ballistic and sued the show because they didn't want the upgrade to begin with.

Would you like it if some powerful stranger showed up in your town and decided to "remodel it" by tearing down your homes, destroying your crops, and rebuilding everything?

You can always build a new village and move the villagers there.

True, but on the other hand it'd be very complicated simulating buying the Villager's property and promising them either a better house somewhere else or a better house in the previous house's current location. In addition, this still doesn't count about the fact that once you've built the villager's their new home, the game's simple idea of how property ownership works means that a crafting station in your house on the same street or your own bed is ripe for a Villager's plundering.

There's also no way for a Villager to understand that the apartment they own may have possessions of theirs in their home, but the player who owns the property can do whatever he pleases and is able to move around beds and such as they like.

Worse yet, assume that while staying in a village, you needed to craft a Barrel and store some goods temporarily. When you need to leave, you mine up your barrel, which just so happens to be the workstation of a fisherman. Obviously this doesn't count as "stealing", much less does it warrant a raid. That's not even counting a player who just happens to set up base in a Village.

Now, if you wanted to add villagers that really do get mad when they're supposed to and if we were to ignore the consequences of complexity or RAM usage for a moment:

- Villagers need far better communication skills. You should be able to talk to them about their property, their work, etc. Unless you can strategically use images to convey some pretty complex ideas clearly, this may require a lot of work for the language translation team.

- Villagers own a property defined by a set of boxes, each defined by two opposite sides.

- Blocks are organized now into 3 categories: Furniture, Construction, and Incidental.

--- Furniture would consist of, well, furniture items like pots, workstations and beds, with bookshelves as a possible inclusion. Construction would include construction materials like stone, hardened clay, wood, etc. Incidental would include blocks that nobody cares if you destroy: water should belong in here so Villagers don't get mad at you for using infinite water sources, but grass and snow would be included here too.

--- A Villager is aware of how much and what type of furniture he owns. If a piece of furniture is placed in his home that he doesn't recognize, he ignores it. If a piece of his furniture is removed by a player, the Villager is made angry. After a long period of time, he may attempt to buy/craft a new piece of furniture. The Villager's anger can be averted if an equivalent furniture item is placed within his property. There may be some situations where the Villager moves furniture around too, but this isn't as important.

--- A Villager has a saved schematic of his property which includes only construction blocks. If blocks are removed, it angers him and if he is angry enough, he may stop trading at all until repairs are done. A Villager will show a player what blocks are missing if asked. If the damage was done by a non-player, the villager may reward the player with cheap trades for repairing his home. (Of course, there is a possibility that players will attempt to lure creepers towards houses, but we'll ignore that for now.)

Villagers also don't like it when you place construction blocks on their house either, so don't do that unless you're repairing their house.

- Villagers now have complete inventories, and will mine and place their furniture if they please.

- You can offer to remodel or move a Villager's home. You will be given two markers to mark out the size and location of each new box that will constitute the Villager's new "property". The Villager will allow you to mine away at his home while you are remodeling and take his furniture items.

- If you offer to remodel or move a Villager's home, he will have specific demands:

--- Before you even begin, the Villager needs to trust you. You'll need to trade with the Villagers in a Village to at least gain some good reputation, or possibly earn Hero of the Village.

--- First, the Villager will require all furniture items he previously owned.

--- Second, the Villager will require that certain construction blocks be used, while others not be used. This may include biome-themed blocks, at least one door, etc.

--- Third, the Villager will request that the new home be illuminated inside, meaning that all blocks covered by a roof must have a light level of 8 or more to prevent mob spawns.

--- Fourth, the property must contain a certain number of roofed blocks, ideally counting additional floors. I was considering having the property be a certain size, but I thought this would be a better way to avoid players giving villagers a small hut on a massive prairie. Plus, we measure houses by floor space in real life.

--- Fifth, the property must be within a certain distance of the village.

- The fifth parameter may be countered if you turn the villager into a settler. A settler is a special unemployed villager that will follow the player around, but only for a hefty emerald price. However, if you want to colonize new lands, or you want to sneak a villager with especially good trades back home, or if you just have a large quantity of emeralds on you and you need to clear a village for construction, this may be worth taking into consideration.

- Alternatively to simplify that previous bit, Villagers can have their property bought which makes them unemployed. They could then be transported the old fashioned way through minecarts or boats, then the player can offer to build the unemployed villager a house.

- Something I forgot to mention, but an unemployed villager will remember previous skills and trades he had in the past and will regain those skills and knowledge once he has a workstation and a house again.

I'm not sure what use this pipe dream has, but maybe someone can attempt to simplify this system to the point that it could be implemented?

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My avatar is a texture from a small block game I made in Python. It's not very good and it probably won't work if you install it.

I'm very alone in my Minecraft worlds as I don't have a very good internet connection to run a server. If you're like me, you might be interested in my Posse mod suggestion.

Maybe they could add some type of mechanic that required you to earn the villagers trust first before doing some DYI fancy work to their villages to improve them. I don't think this should just be handed to the player early in game, it should be a progression based system like the trades.

In real life people (with common sense) wouldn't just willingly enable any stranger to come to their house and do a makeover without doing research into their qualifications or reputation. Trust is (or should be) earned, not given to every Tom Richard and Harry.

I guess that's true, and a great point. But in my opinion villagers are pretty stupid.

and the villagers don't seem to have any way of defending themselves against the patrols outside of iron golems.

Their AI is pathetic, even people back in the medieval time period had ways to defend themselves and carried weapons and armour, villagers or not.

Of course you're expected to defend them, but when you're focusing your attention on a single entity you're not going to be able to prevent an arrow that is coming from another archer hitting a villager. Villagers need an overhaul, and I propose they implement a warrior subset of villagers who will aid against the battle against the pillagers who come looking for trouble. Although at least we can use defence walls to keep the pillagers out.

This doesn't stop pillagers being a problem when you have to leave your village though.

To be fair on the first one, the game implies that Villagers don't fight directly for reasons they cannot control, considering how willing they are to pay the Player for rotten flesh and sell them maps to Woodland mansions, both of which are actions that can be understood as siccing the Player on zombies and Illagers, respectively. There's also the part where they still sell you weapons and make them in spite of not using them personally, which means that they're willing to equip you to fight (which wouldn't exactly be fine to a pacifist).

I think destroying and building villager houses should give -1 and +1 reputation respectively. That way, it doesn't punish players who accidentaly take 1 block out of a house, and rewards those who actually build more houses in the village.

Many have brought up concerns over how easy villages are in survival mode. In fact, Mojang’s original reasoning for such bare village was to counter the possibility of a player finding a village and getting all the resources they’d ever need, striping the game of its “survival” nature.

But still, there were crop farms and blacksmith shops which were notorious among the community as excellent places to steal from the poor villagers.

It becomes especially ironic when you are trading for emeralds from the villagers with the wheat you just stole from them.

1.14 up this even further. Now villages have beds, carpet, and workstations.

My fix for this issue is a simple one. Any time a player destroys a crop, bed, or workstation within a village, they are given the bad omen effect, which triggers a raid that makes a player second-guess their attempted robbery.

This is a fantastic idea, and would encourage players to find and earn items from dungeons, mineshafts, and non-village lootable sources. Naturally, this ability would be nixed on Peaceful difficulty, but it would be nice on Easy and higher difficulties. I don't know if you know this but on Bedrock Edition as it is, if a villager, especially a Farmer is close enough to crops and you harvest them, they will rush over to the crop and take priority on the crop, picking it up instead of you. Test it if you don't believe me. Your idea on a general note takes this a step further.

I know Beetroot seeds can be obtained currently in Woodland Mansion, Dungeon, and Mineshaft chests, however the only addition that I would make to this awesome idea is that Zombies have beetroot added to their loot table as a rare drop on top of the carrots and potatoes in it. This would perfect the idea.